Conventional approaches to transporting mobile, business, and residential service traffic have dedicated different parallel communications networks to transporting the traffic of different services. More recent approaches, by contrast, contemplate transporting the traffic of those different services together using the same network. Converging the different parallel networks into one common network in this way would prove more efficient and cost-effective.
Aggregating the data traffic of multiple services at a data packet level through so-called packet aggregation presents one option for realizing such a “converged” communications network, which may be referred to as an “aggregated” communications network. But while data packet aggregation currently requires less hardware expense, it proves difficult to scale as data traffic volume increases and involves significant complexity. Aggregating the data traffic of multiple services in the optical domain, e.g., using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), is more promising in this regard. However, one obstacle to realizing managing such network is that establishment of communicative connections between optical ports comprised in nodes of the WDM optical network is cumbersome, typically time consuming and is requiring more manual intervention than desirable.